Andy Milk Interactive

Blue Box Group

To put it simply, these guys are the best.

Here’s a few reasons why:

• They offer both Shared and Virtual hosting solutions for Rails
• Plans can start as cheap as $10/month.  This is a shared server but you have MANY Ruby gems at your disposal.
• Virtual plans start at $25/month and you can upgrade as the need arises (memory low, site lag, traffic increases, etc.)
• Their support is as easy as sending an email.  I usually get at least a “I’m looking into this now” email within 30 minutes.  I don’t have to use any sort of support ticket system.  They offer one (and the emails feed into it), but they don’t require it.
• These guys KNOW their Rails environments, deployment recipes, common bugs, and plugins.  There’s almost never a question they can’t answer, or at least point me in the right direction

I’m using them for several projects, both internal and client projects.  I’m recommending them to anyone who needs Rails hosting.

Here they are: http://www.blueboxgrp.com/

I love their tagline: “Where Ruby on Rails hosting isn’t a headache!”

I spent most of 2008 working on one project and it launched today. I’m very proud of it and I hope it’s a big success. It’s called Calisto100.com and it’s being billed as “an Exclusive Dating Site, the First Social Filter for Quality Singles.”

Here’s a press release about it: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20081215005349&newsLang=en

We kicked off the project early this year and it took a lot of hard work and a crystal clear vision from my client to pull it together.  On the technology side, it has quite a few bells and whistles from AJAX to image lightboxes to automated processes and many more.  The CSS is air tight and looks almost identical across the most widely used browsers (even IE6!)

Please visit the site and have a look around.  If this site is for you, PLEASE APPLY!

http://www.calisto100.com

I haven’t had much time lately to write any blogs, but I figure I’d post a few tidbits of some neat Rails, Javascript, web service, and AJAX widgets that I’ve had the pleasure of integrating on recent projects. I’ll start with a very simple Rails plug-in that I used for an online coupon redemption program.

It’s a barcode generator that uses the Gbarcode gem. It was a snap to integrate and I had barcodes on these online coupons in less than a day, fully tested.

http://code.google.com/p/barcode-generator/

The web app I used this on is not for public consumption, but feel free to email me and I can demonstrate.

Cheers,

Andy